First opened Wednesday, May 5, 2010
父
ちち
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
(my) father
Father is a doubled syllable too: Old Japanese titi, Proto-Japonic *titi.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 父
In a sentence
彼らはチョーサーを英詩の父と呼んだ。
They referred to Chaucer as the father of English poetry.
物心ついた時には父と祖母と3人暮らしでした。
When I became aware of my surroundings, I was living with my father and grandmother.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “From Old Japanese 父 (titi), from Proto-Japonic *titi.”
- “Still in modern usage.”
Source: Wiktionary: 父 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 父 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ちち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
てて
- “Appears in the Utsubo Monogatari of roughly 970 CE.”
- “Glossed as “I[gualmente], chichi. Pay” (“same as chichi. Father”) in Nippo Jisho.”
- “Shift from chichi.”
- “Usage continued until at least the early 1700s.”
とと
- “Appears in the Nippo Jisho of 1603.”
- “Originally a shift from chichi or tete in baby talk, used by children to refer to their own father.”
- “Still in modern usage.”
ちゃん
- “/totosan/ → /totːɕan/ → /t͡ɕan/”
- “Likely a contraction of 父さん (toto-san).”
ふ
- “The “father” and “uncle” affixes is from Middle Chinese 父 (MC bjuX).”
- “The “old man” affix is from Middle Chinese 父 (MC pjuX).”
ほ
- “From a corruption of Middle Chinese 父 (MC pjuX).”
かぞ・かそ
- “⟨kaso₂⟩ → */kasə/ → /kaso/ → /kazo/”
- “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE as unvoiced kaso. Further derivation unknown.”
- “May have fallen out of use by 1603, when neither kaso nor kazo are found in the Nippo Jisho. Kaso would be here as the sixth entry from the bottom on the left, and kazo would be here as the eighth from the bottom on the right.”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.